OCD and ArtIn the first room,
labor-intensive, repetitive, and accumulative mark-making are most prominent.
Russell Crotty's "scientifically observed" ballpoint pen drawings
and notations are not specific enough to communicate their intention and
mostly accumulate to achieve an end product (the large book landscape
for example). Ugo Rondinone's landscape images are obsessive but do not
lose their connection to his intention. Using the projected and enlarged
image, reversing the tonality, and building the image with a modular,
incremental mark, Rondinone's drawings are removed from their original
source, giving an ironic stance to the traditional plein air sketches
of the late nineteenth century.

Faux Delicacy
Jennifer Pastor's wispy lines and ethereal drawing marks fail to connect
with the content of their subject. Matthew Ritchie's pastel ink drawings
describe a twisting and airy landscape. His organic and lightly colored
images fail to create a sense of palpability - like a Turner without the
edges. Artists whose delicate aesthetic is more substantive and not faux
at all are Toba Khedoori, Shahzia Sikander and Mark Manders. Khedoori's
minimal structures (doors, windows, and broken houses) created with a
nearly transparent palette, are supported by the wax coating she gives
the large-scale paper. Complete with studio debris such as dust and hair,
the white of the paper becomes a physical support to the fragility of
the image. Sikander uses a pastel palette and soft contours over Persian
miniature images. These ornate compositions are layered with the authority
of an historic genre and the authenticity of her imagery. Manders' freewheeling
line corresponds perfectly to his quirky oddball imagery.

Paper Cutout Club
Paper cutout collage makes a strong showing via Laura Owens, Jockum Nordström
and David Thorpe. Nordström constructs his pictures as a quilt would
be organized with a border, strong geometry and flat colored shapes à
la folk art. But the innocence of the pattern is belied by the sinister
narrative. Owens uses paper cutout to quote folk art to less successful
ends. She lacks structure because her content shifts from folk art into
decorative romanticism. Paper shapes collaged onto a backdrop of wishy-washy
watercolors yield mediocre results at best.

Chris Ofili Prince
among Thieves with Flowers 1999
pencil on paper, 29¾ x 22¼ inches
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of David Teiger and the Friends
of Contemporary Drawing; photo courtesy Gavin Brown's enterprise, with
detail to right

Many Sources
Tapping into various cultural motifs, artists raid history to jive with
their own personal agendas. Chris Ofili's take-offs on Piero Della Francesca's
"Duke and Duchess of Urbino", are infused with Afro-centricism,
de-centering the authority of western civilization. Little heads with
large afros and a botanic overlay create a crazy but seamless fusion of
two cultures. Yoshitomo Nara ruthlessly updates Japanese prints with heavy
magic marker cartoons to de-sentimentalize a classical tradition such
as Ukiyo-e. Using cross hatching and white chalk on a colored ground,
John Currin draws on technical traditions of great masters, Titian, Pontormo
and the like. At the same time, however, his imagery (Rubenesque women
with suitcases strapped to their bottoms or toting marshmallows on a stick)
indicates he wants to straddle the world of satire. Which is it? Is he
a great master or a great satirist? Either way, the florid drawing technique
is too exaggerated to efficiently convey a message.

Denial of Perspective: Flatness
Kevin Appel offsets the perspective of his architectural structures with
rectangles of flat color giving the drawings tension. Julie Mehretu also
sets up a perspectival space using flat color in layers to counter it.
But her arabesque lines are arranged in layers with varying degrees of
thickness and opacity that diffuse the structure and tension. Elizabeth
Peyton's colored pencil portraits of attractive people border on pre-raphaelite
sentimentality made flat and abstract by an organization of richly colored,
un-modulated shapes.

One-Off's
Things we'd rather not see in museums: collage installations the curator
organizes in hodgepodge fashion with scotch tape. Barry McGee does this
all on his own, however, with his large installation of mismatched framed
drawings and photographs. De-contextualized from their trailer-trash installation,
these pencil drawings make ugliness compelling. Like George Grosz, he
makes figures with angular body types and depressive expressions. With
a little editing of the onslaught of picture-framed drawings you'd be
able to see what is good about this artist's work.